Senior Project Advisor

Jane Wong

Document Type

Project

Publication Date

Spring 2020

Keywords

Poetry, Indigenous, Hawaiian Language, Ancestry

Abstract

My Honors Capstone project, H(u)ina, is an homage to my ancestors, my homeland, and to those who have believed in me these past four years. This project began in my Spring quarter of my junior year, and has come to completion in the Spring quarter of my final year, and celebrates the complexities of relation. As an indigenous woman, I learned from young the importance of community, and the power of words. Through poetry, I have found a way to process the world around me – just as my peers and I were challenged to do in our first Honors class, when asked to critically analyze not the situation of stories, but the aspect of individual-community relationships. In this collection, readers can share with me the joys and sorrows, the love and the radical that I have experienced as I’ve grown into the person I am today. Yet, poetry is not just about the writing. Indeed, each piece is its own kind of ecology. This I have learned through the field of anthropology, especially in looking at matters of concern, and surprisingly, the Everglades. As matters of concern outline the idea that no event or entity is separate from those around it, the idea so too explains the relationships between mangrove, taro, other rhizomatic plant systems, and us. Thus, I conclude this collection with a poetic essay on these entanglements with which we engage everyday, both consciously and unconsciously. In this network of poems, readers begin with birth and belonging, and conclude with the notion that there are no clear endings, beginnings, or middles, and thus we experience the true nature of relation.

Department

English

Subjects - Topical (LCSH)

American poetry--21st century

Genre/Form

poetry

Type

Text

Rights

Copying of this document in whole or in part is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this document for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without the author’s written permission.

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

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